The Old Fox Deceived

by Martha Grimes

“Yes, it is. I’ve a newer one.” Jury produced the picture which Melrose Plant had given Wiggins. “What about her?”

  “Oh, yes. She was a good friend of . . . one of our guests.”

  The Sawry took upon itself the responsibility for its guests’ well-being; there would be no unnecessary divulging of information, certainly no gossip. The place was like a sanctuary or a safehouse. It was as if the mahogany and glass were firmly shut against the ugly facts of the world beyond.

  “A friend of Julian Crael?”

  He looked relieved. If the police already knew of the connection, then perhaps it wasn’t a breach of trust to confirm it. “Yes, that’s right.” He was not, however, about to embellish unless he had to.

  “How often did she come here?”

  He thought for a moment. “A number of times. Off and on, for about a year. Visiting Mr. Crael.”

  “Her name?”

  The clerk looked decidedly puzzled. “Temple. Miss Temple.” He brought out the guest register again. “It was only last month — December. Here.” He turned the book round for Jury’s inspection. “December the tenth. A Miss Temple. I believe she left the evening of the same day Mr. Crael left.”

  “Had she any visitors?” Jury helped him out by describing Olive Manning. The clerk shook his head. “Telephone calls?”

  “None that I know of, but I can check.”

  “Please do. And let me know.” Jury handed him his card and turned to leave, when the clerk stopped him.

  “There is one thing, sir. Another gentleman was here a short time ago — a Mr. Carruthers-Todd — just this afternoon, inquiring after Mr. Crael and Miss Temple. And he left a message—” The clerk plucked it from its cubbyhole.

  “And what did Mr. Carruthers-Todd look like?”

  “Quite well-off, I’d say. And well-spoken.” Having dispensed with the important points, he went on: “Not quite as tall as you, fair hair. Very green eyes. The message was left for —” and the clerk looked down. “A Mr. Benderby. Eustace Benderby.”

  “I’m Benderby,” said Jury, putting out his hand for the note.

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  The Royal Victoria Hotel did not live up to its name. It was wedged between two other buildings, one called the Arab Star, where a peeling sign brandished a scimitar and star. From its portals emerged two young men, black-mustached and talking with their hands.

  Inside a small room with a cottage-style door sat a girl who was more interested in applying lip rouge than in greeting prospective customers. Finally, she came forward, her purple-hooded eyes drifting over him. She blew a bubble and tucked it back in. He showed his I.D. “I’m looking for a woman who might have stayed here. Her name is Roberta Makepiece.”

  “Can’t say I remember no one like that. They come, they go.” She made the most of arranging her breasts under the blue twin-set. Another bubble appeared close to Jury’s chin. Then she said, “Dotty might know.”

  “Who’s Dotty?”

  “Owner-manager.”

  “And where’s Dotty?”

  “Manchester. Went off with her fella.” Her lashes worked. Thick with mascara, they had beaded the skin under her eyes.

  “And when will Dotty be back?”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  “Then I can’t ask Dotty, can I?”

  The sarcasm fell wide. “Well, you could ask Mary, I s’pose. If this person worked here, Mary’d know.”

  “Where is this Mary?”

  She had a small purse-mirror out now and was inspecting the mouth again, bored with Jury now that he was interested only in Mary. “Mary Riordan. Round there —” and she waved vaguely. “Setting up tables in the dining room, I expect.”

  • • •

  There were two of them in the dining room, the one named Mary and another bucolic lass, bovine, her hair in two spare brown braids, her complexion biscuit-colored. She moved about lethargically placing napkins and cutlery.

  Mary was, fortunately, less dim-looking. She had a soft, breathy, Irish voice to go with her very blue eyes. “Roberta Makepiece? Well, now . . . aye. I remember now. Though she didn’t work here long.” Mary clasped her metal tray to her bosom like armour plate. “Went off with some fella.”

  The Royal Victoria seemed to cater for lovers. “You don’t know where?” Jury’s heart sank and then surfaced when Mary nodded and said:

  “I might do. See, I got a letter from her . . . well, it was money she’d borrowed and was giving back. There was an address. Could you just be waiting a bit and I’ll run up and get it?”

  “I’ll wait all day, love, if need be.” He smiled. He could have kissed Mary; she was, indeed, growing prettier and more pink-cheeked by the moment.

  Jury’s smile sent her walking backwards into the doorjamb. Blushing, she turned and hurried out, still carrying the tray. In her absence he reread Plant’s note. It was short enough:

  Call me at the Connaught. If you’re still speaking.

  PLANT

  The girl with the braids, whose progress round the tables was less than brisk, snuffled adenoidally. Jury was reminded of Sergeant Wiggins.

  Mary returned, a letter in her hand. “I found it. But her name’s not Makepiece any more. It’s Cory. Here’s the address.” She held the note out to Jury. It was a flat in Wanstead.

  “Must of got married,” said Mary.

  Jury smiled. “Or something. Thank you, Mary. You don’t know how much you’ve helped out. Is there a public telephone? I need to call someone.”

  Mary’s blue eyes glimmered up at him. It was plain to see she was only too glad to help out Scotland Yard as she led Jury to the telephone.

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  The look she gave him, up and down, could have stripped varnish off a chair.

  “Roberta Makepiece?”

  Above the chain lock, her jaw stopped working over the gum which she had been slowly chewing. “My name’s Cory. Mrs. Cory. You’ve got the wrong place.” As she started to shut the door, Jury put his hand against it.

  “C.I.D., Mrs. Cory. Chief Inspector Richard Jury.” He shoved the plasticined I.D. toward her face.

  “Whatever — ?” Her eyes widened. “Joey? Is it Joey?” But her voice was more relieved than anxious. It made Jury wonder about love and loyalty.

  “If I could just come in . . . ? It won’t take long.”

  The door closed a bit while she rattled back the chain and then held the door wide, motioning him in with a curt nod. “I was only just on my way out to the shops.”

  “It won’t take long. Could we sit down?”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Jury sat on the edge of a shiny, imitation-leather chair. She took a seat on the white, fake-fur couch. Everything in the flat — the furnishings, the curtains, the clothes she wore looked cheap and new and clean, as if the lives lived here had sprung suddenly and fully staged from the stones of Wanstead. The flat was like a model-display in some department store window, complete with mannequin. Roberta Makepiece had a gaunt, wooden prettiness — uninviting and unbending. The steps with which she had retreated to the white couch were small and mincing, restricted by her tight, calf-length skirt. Above it she wore a striped jumper molded around small, pointy breasts. Her face was made thinner by the deadweight of looped curls held up around her head by little tortoiseshell combs and cemented there with hair spray. Jury wondered what Cory found appealing in all of this constriction. To have her around would be like always having a sore throat. He also guessed she wasn’t really Mrs. Cory; she would be, like the furniture, easily disposable.

  With a brightly varnished thumb and forefinger she took the gum from her mouth and dropped it in an enormous glass ashtray where it lay sadly, the only thing in the room that looked used.

  Her bag and her coat rested beside her on the white couch. That she had been on her way out was apparently the truth. He doubted she often told it.

  Why had he seen it, in his mind’s eye, so differently? A blowsy, pretty woman in a wrapper, an unmade bed, snaps of
Bertie stuck here and there round a mirrored dressing table. There wasn’t a sign of him here, not in a photo, not in her face.

  “Well? What’s this all about, then?” The bright red fingers went up to her hair, making sure its shellacked perfection remained undisturbed by this awkward intrusion into her life.

  “I’m here about your son, Mrs. Cory.”

  She looked away quickly, plucked the gum up out of the ashtray. “I haven’t” — she popped it in her mouth — “got any son. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Jury felt himself grow cold, his fingers stiffening around the edge of the chair arm. “I’m talking about Bertie. Bertie Makepiece.” He said it, he felt idiotically, as if the name might jangle some chord of memory. Oh, him, she would say, snapping her fingers.

  What she started to say was that she didn’t know, but his expression must have been fearful, for she said instead: “Look here, what’s Scotland Yard to do with this? Why are police coming round? Have you got something to do with social services, or something?” Her tone grew more urgent. “I suppose you’re going to make me go back?”

  “I’m not here officially. I’m just interested. I met Bertie while I was working on a case and thought the story he told of your absence peculiar. Bertie claims his mother — you — had to go to tend a sick grandmother. In Northern Ireland. Seems you’re in London, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Northern Ireland? I never said nothing about Ireland! I’ve got an old gran lives there, but I never said I was going there.” Bertie, she seemed to feel, was now culpable. “Imagine!”

  “Bertie’s been telling people the old gran lives in Northern Ireland. On the Bogside.” In spite of himself, Jury smiled. But she merely looked blank. Had he meant to surprise in her some humor, some shared laughter over her son’s ingenuity? To find something of the mother in her yet?

  “He always made up stories. He was a great one for making things up. . . . ” Her voice trailed away as she plucked the fur of the couch.

  “Bertie? He strikes me as just the opposite. Serious, levelheaded, a good manager.” If anyone was living a fantasy life, it was the mother, not the son. Looking around the room once more he thought what a thin fantasy it was, too.

  “Yes, he is. A better manager than me. Bertie could do it all and often did when I was working. Cooking, washing up, cleaning. He even got so’s he could send that old dog to the shops. He’s still there, ain’t he? Arnold?”

  She might have been inquiring after some childhood acquaintance. Jury nodded. Her tone became belligerent and she leaned toward him, hands tightly clasped about her knees. “You listen, now. Bert gets money, I see to that. I told him just to go ahead and cash the pension cheques —”

  “He’d have to sign them to do that. That’s forgery.”

  “Well, anyway. Look, you’ve got to understand. I did write to him a few times. I did explain things to him, I mean how I couldn’t stand living in that place. I didn’t just go off and leave him high and dry.”

  You could have fooled me, thought Jury. “So you told Miss Cavendish and one or two others to look in. You told Miss Cavendish you were going to London, is that right?”

  Eagerly, she nodded, as if now that they were on the same wavelength, it didn’t look so bad to him, did it? “Look, I admit I’m not much of a mother.” Grimly, she smiled, as if the admission wiped the slate clean. “But let me tell you, I was never one wanted kids. I got married too young. Only eighteen . . . ”

  And so it began, like the celebration of an old mass which had lost all meaning, the justification of her behavior: tedious and familiar to Jury, who had heard the story, or stories like it, so many times before.

  The hardships of her life in that little fishing village. A failed marriage to a no-good bastard. Struggle, struggle, struggle with money. The lack of advantages, the lack of prospects, and she was still young, wasn’t she? And Rackmoor itself. The sheer bone-aching boredom of it, up there in the North, no city lights, no entertainment, nothing. Her meeting with Joey Cory. Handsome, made her laugh, had money. But he didn’t want her if it meant a kid around. No kids, he said.

  “See all this? New, it is. Cory buys everything new. Something gets beat up, dirty, we just throw it out and buy new.” Her tight, bowlike smile was triumphant, as if she’d found a way to beat the house.

  A disposable life. Jury could see the days peeling away from this room like the pages of a calendar, still blank, nothing entered. He rose from his chair. “And what does he do with you when you get beat up and dirty?”

  Rage drew her up from the couch, her thin face like a cold, white flame. The slap across his face made him flinch, but hardly hurt. Her hand was so weightless it was more the hysterical brush of a bird’s wing.

  And she had merely frightened herself, after all, catching the offending hand with the other. He saw now how thin the hands were, thin and blue-veined. He wondered at her gauntness, those formerly rounded and pleasant lines planed now into angles. There were hollows under the cheekbones.

  “You’ve no right to come here, saying things like that,” she flared up again. “And now I suppose you’re going straight to social services and tell them? I’m not going back to Rackmoor, I can tell you that. If I’ve got to keep him he’ll have to come here and —” She drew a hand across her forehead as if it ached. Obviously, the thought of Cory stopped that idea.

  “I’m not going to tell them,” Jury said. “I don’t want them to find you.”

  She blinked and stared at him in the expanding silence. But she didn’t look relieved. Her brows drew together. It was as if life had merely formed itself into a new puzzle, a harder one, its design cut up in even tinier bits of grass and sky, its colors muted, more difficult to fit.

  Jury thought of the life Bertie would have with her mashed under her oppressive frustration of having to carry him, a lumpy bit of luggage, in her aching hand. Anyone anything, nearly, would be better company than she: lone liness, deprivation, need, loss — all would be better company. More dependable, more palpable even, something you could reach out and touch. But Roberta Makepiece seemed incapable of being touched any longer. She stood there now — they were at the door — in her straight dark clothes against that white background like an angry slash some artist had drawn against his composition, hating it.

  “What you’ll do is this,” said Jury. “You’re going to write three letters. One to Bertie — to him you’ll tell the truth. Just what you told me. Be careful that you don’t lie, pretty it up, give him any hope. Except the one hope: that he’ll never, under any circumstances, have to go to a Home. That you’ll help him, temporarily, with the lie he’s been forced to tell. That’s the purpose of the second letter: you’ll tell Miss Cavendish what Bertie’s told people. You’re in Northern Ireland, in Belfast, taking care of poor old granny. Make it good and sad and a lingering death. Indeed, so lingering, you’re not sure if you’ll get back in the foreseenable future. That means you’ll need someone in Rackmoor to look after Bertie. And that’s the third letter: Kitty Meechem. I’d say Kitty is the perfect person —”

  “Kitty! You mean her as runs the Fox Deceiv’d? Listen, I’m not having my boy living in no pub —”

  Jury was not even angered by the oddity of that “my boy,” by the strangely twisted morality, since he half-suspected that what motivated Roberta Makepiece now was a very real sense of impending loss.

  “It’s a perfectly respectable business and Kitty’s a great person. She’s very fond of Bertie. And Arnold, too. Of course, there’s always Frog Eyes and Codfish, if you’d rather—”

  That surprised a smile in her, which she quickly hid. “Not them, not hardly. But look here —”

  Jury overrode any objection: “Then take those letters and put them in an envelope and send them to that old gran for posting from Ireland. That at least will give us something to be going on with until the whole thing can be sorted out—” He did not want to say “legally.” It would have had, for her, such a r
ing of finality. It was strange. Cold as she was, made colder still by this ice-white room — cold, calculating, self-centered — still, he sensed a fear in her that she might really lose what she had already thrown away.

  “And if I don’t?” There was only the pretense of a challenge in the tone.

  “Then I’ll be back. Good-bye, Mrs. Cory.”

  But she plucked at his sleeve as he opened the door. “Just you wait —” She didn’t seem to want him to leave, yet she didn’t seem to know why she wanted him to stay. For one more moment she held him there by saying: “Robert. His name’s really Robert.”

  “What?” Jury was confused.

  Vaguely she smiled, her mind seeming to shift through an old album. “He’s called Bertie for short. But his name’s Robert. Named him after me, I did.”

  It pierced Jury like a tiny arrow that she had, at one time, found some need to tie the child to her. Roberta and Robert.

  A long way back in their interview, his anger toward her had died. “I’ll remember that.” He smiled. His smile coaxed a smile in return from Roberta Makepiece. “Good-bye.”

  The door shut behind him.

  • • •

  He walked back down the street towards the tube stop The block was deserted except for a mangy-looking orange cat washing itself on a stoop. The fur looked intractable beneath the tongue; still the cat kept at it. A wind sprang up and pasted a page from a newspaper against Jury’s leg. It blew off again, shunted by the wind, now against a tree now catching an iron railing, like some old distracted pensioner seeking out its own door, not finding it.

  He walked on down the street, the paper blowing farther and farther, and wondered why he had come, felt he had accomplished little. Yet, some person he had internalized seemed to approve his act. He remembered a teacher he had had when he was very small, a teacher whom he had loved with a child’s passion, putting her hand on his head and smiling down at him and commending him for having wiped a chalky blackboard especially clean.

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